Setting the Stage

Abstract

The nineteenth century saw a major transition in thinking from a static universe made perfect by a divine creator to one full of change. The transition was led by biologists, most notably Charles Darwin. Darwin’s panoramic vision of evolution involved the interaction between two major factors, the Nature of the Organism and Nature of the Conditions, with the former predominating over the latter due to the historically conservative and autonomous nature of organisms and their inheritance systems. From this emerges a “struggle for existence” producing Natural Selection—an outcome of the interaction favoring any organism adequate enough to cope with the conditions by surviving and reproducing. In today’s terms, Darwinism was a theory of complex systems, which he attempted to communicate using two great visual metaphors, the Tree of Life and Entangled Bank. In Darwin’s day, complexity was not in style; good theories were simple with deterministic lawlike behavior. Furthermore, social styles that originated in the eighteenth century including Naturalism, Modernism, and Romanticism, sought progress and perfection in explanations of the natural world. Within the scientific community, the mix of these social preferences and general acceptance of the notion of biological evolution led to several research programs aimed at “fixing” or replacing Darwinism. By the end of the nineteenth century, four distinct theoretical frameworks—Geographic differentiation, Orthogenesis, neo-Lamarckism, and neo-Darwinism—had emerged as rivals in the race to replace Darwin.